New Year's Resolutions: Do They Work?

This new year, like every other new year, millions of Americans will make New Year's resolutions like taking better care of themselves and their finances or becoming more organized.?But, this year, like every other year, only 9% of us will actually report feeling successful in keeping those resolutions.?This begs the question, "should we even bother making New Year's resolutions?"??

As it turns out, most experts are recommending the answer to that as "no."?Resolutions are usually a very short-lived commitment. There's actually a day (January 19th) called "Quitters Day" when most resolution setters decide to throw in the towel on those trendy, unrealistic declarations of future accomplishments that have no healthy foundation in self-examination or prior planning.?

It turns out that making changes to your life isn't a one-time, once a year decision, but something that takes a fair amount of planning, effort, and determination every single day.??

James Clear, writer speaker and author, advocates for regular checks ins, journaling, and evaluations of what is going on with your routines and habits. In his book?Atomic Habits, Clear discusses the importance of small changes made on a daily basis and how writing down these habits and evaluating them is an investment that allows us to have more free time for the things we want to do rather than getting caught up in the rat race of chores that we seem to like to put off.?He says, "the most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do."

Similarly, Ayelet Fishback, one of the world's foremost researchers on the science of motivation and author of?How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be?recommends setting goals that are associated with a specific number.?Fishback states "I think of goals like baking recipes. You need exact quantities."?As it stands, our goals need to be very specific and very achievable or we won't stick with them.

They also need to have a clear beginning, middle and end.?A 2014 study from researchers at Wharton Business School in Philadelphia discovered that when the passage of time is clearly demarcated by "temporal landmarks" (like a new year), the mind creates new "mental accounting periods" that "relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviors." Hence, the desire to make New Year's resolutions. However, Fishback suggests we keep these temporal landmarks short-the beginning of a new week or month instead of focusing on a new year.?

If we want to make and KEEP our resolutions, we should start planning for their successes several months in advance-taking stock in what we're already doing, creating small, actionable, measurable goals, and setting landmarks of achievement for which we reward ourselves. Maybe it's not the destination that we should focus on, but each step in the journey whos sum leads us there. After all, the footprint in front of you can never appear without the one behind it.